Jonathan Rose grew up inside the family firm his grandfather and great-uncle founded in 1925—Rose Associates, a New York powerhouse that insisted every building stand within walking distance of mass transit, long before anyone called such an approach transit-oriented development. By 13, he was working on job sites; by his late 20s, he was running projects. In 1989, he left to start Jonathan Rose Companies, now one of the nation’s largest mission-driven real estate platforms, with more than 20,000 affordable and mixed-income homes preserved or built, seven impact funds raised since 2005, and a 2025 fund close of $660 million that will control roughly $2 billion in assets and preserve 100,000 “unit-years” of affordability.
We sat down with ULI Visionary Jonathan Rose during the Institute’s Fall Meeting in San Francisco to learn more about his four-decade ULI membership and the work that lies ahead.
Urban Land: You’re a 40-year member—since 1985—and a Visionary in 2021. What can you share about your ULI journey?
Jonathan Rose: I was introduced to ULI by my uncle, Dan Rose, who was very active in ULI and had an enormous amount of respect for the organization and its community. There weren’t that many people as young as I was, so it was an amazing exposure to the broader real estate industry. When I joined, my understanding of real estate was parochial—I was in a family business in New York and understood New York real estate—but this gave me a sense of national real estate and many other forms of real estate. I was also always very interested in green building and affordable housing, and socially responsible real estate. These were early, emerging ideas that were not ULI’s focus at the time.
In the 1990s, ULI leaders formed a committee on the environment. It was founded by developers and lawyers who were frustrated by environmental regulations, and who hoped to lobby to reduce environmental legislation. It was simply called, “Committee on the Environment.” And so, all of the pro-environmentalists at ULI showed up for the first meeting, thinking that it would be a pro-environmental meeting! Unable to reconcile these opposing views, ULI put the committee on hold until Jim Chaffin became the ULI Chair. He advanced the greening of ULI. That brought us all out of the woodwork. We’d had no home, and all of a sudden, we found one. The Committee on the Environment became a group called CLUE—Committee on Land Use and Environment, which I became the co-chair of with Ken Hubbard. All the things that are green in ULI now [e.g., Randall Lewis Center for Sustainability in Real Estate, Greenprint Center for Building Performance, Building Healthy Places Initiative, and the Urban Resilience Program] grew out of that. That was the first leadership position I had with ULI.
UL: And then you became very visible as the green expert.
Rose: In the 1980s, when I joined ULI, it had no interest in green buildings, much less green cities. As interest began to emerge in the early 2000s, they would put me on panels as the “green guy” against non-green experts. I remember a panel at a spring or fall meeting, around 2008, set up as a debate about the environment. I was the last person to speak. Hamid Moghadam, head of Prologis, went first and said, “We’re going full bore on green because our German clients want the same standard throughout the world; we’re saving energy and money, and when you take a one-story building and put solar on the roof, you can lower energy costs.” Then Barry Gosin spoke and said that the definition of a class A office building included being LEED Gold. One by one, all the people who were supposed to be the non-green experts described how essential the environment was to their customers. When it came time for me to speak, there was nothing to argue with! That felt like a real turning point in ULI’s full adoption of a green agenda.
UL: After that turning-point environmental panel, what happened next?
Rose: Not everybody in ULI was immediately sold on going green, but the cultural center of gravity shifted from “green is a cost and regulatory burden ” to a cultural expectation that building excellence includes being green. All of a sudden, there weren’t just a few green panels; environmental principles spread throughout ULI’s programming.
UL: You also saw the New Urbanism debate up close.
Rose: The Congress for New Urbanism was founded in 1993. At the time, its ideas, which have become pretty central to contemporary community development, were considered radical. ULI had an annual meeting in Denver, in 1998, at the same time the upstart Congress for New Urbanism [CNU] was meeting. ULI’s ideas were controversial at the time. The real estate industry then was full-bore developing suburban sprawl. I arranged for there to be a debate between CNU and ULI. Andrés Duany and Peter Calthorpe came over to ULI. It was interesting how emphatic both sides were. The large-scale suburban developers thought they were on the right path and New Urbanism was an irrelevant fad. But on the ground, in the end, New Urbanism won, because it provided communities that were more in alignment with how people want to live.
Over time, I’ve seen ULI continuously evolve and change. It adopted the Green Movement, New Urbanism, and integrated affordable and workforce housing with Ron Terwilliger’s leadership. That ability to keep evolving is one of its greatest strengths.
UL: What were your first green shoots?
Rose: When I started out developing, there were no green standards such as LEED. I had to invent my own systems. The first project I really built on my own was in 1979, and it was extremely difficult to find green materials. I went to the local lumber store and said I wanted wood that didn’t come from exploiting the rainforest. The guy said, “I don’t know where the wood comes from. You want it, buy it; you don’t, don’t.” There was no perspective on environmental sourcing, energy use, VOCs. In the early 1990s, I created something called the “10 Ss of Sustainable Development”—my own internal LEED rating system. Start in the right location, assemble the right team, skin, systems, startup, commissioning, et cetera.
In 1996, I partnered with the Greyston Foundation, a Buddhist-based community development nonprofit in Yonkers, New York, to create housing for homeless people with AIDS—at a time when people were dying with AIDS, not living with it. AIDS is an immunodeficiency syndrome, so people diagnosed with it are very vulnerable to environmental toxins. We designed a building with as few toxic chemicals as possible. Because it was for the homeless, we were providing furniture, and the fire retardants in normal furniture were problematic, so we had to make our own furniture.
UL: What brought you to ULI in the first place?
Rose: My family, who started the business in 1925, had a principle—develop within walking distance of mass transit because not that many people had cars. They kept that philosophy through suburbanization. In the 1980s, I was working at Rose Associates. There has always been an affordable housing crisis, but under then mayor Ed Koch, the city, the Real Estate Board, and the New York City Partnership, there was commitment to work together to find new solutions. My father, Fred Rose, who was on the board of the partnership, volunteered me to lead an affordable housing initiative. I assembled an extraordinary site in Brooklyn, around the Atlantic Terminal train station, and brought in a young architect, Peter Calthorpe (who became my brother-in-law when I married his sister), specializing in transit-oriented development. Together, we designed one of the first explicitly post–World War II transit-oriented development plans for that site. That’s when I became engaged with bigger city-planning issues. ULI was the organization dealing with buildings, but also city-making, and it became a forum for me to explore these ideas. My family eventually sold the site to Forest City. Some very specific things I put in the plan remain there today.
UL: Your family’s business is still building multifamily.
Rose: Yes, they focus on the development of market rate multifamily in the New York metropolitan area. I wanted to be national, green, and focused on affordable housing. We had a peaceful separation in 1989, when I left and formed my own company.
UL: What made you so socially minded?
Rose: I’m a child of the ’60s and the counterculture. I grew up playing in nature, in Westchester, and had a deep connection to it, and a sense that pollution was harming nature. My mother was very involved in the Civil Rights Movement and voter registration. Since I was a little child, I visited projects under construction with my father. I loved the process of building. I started working summers, at 13, as a laborer. I loved building, loved the environment, was committed to social justice, and wanted to figure out a career that could put these things together.
UL: How did ULI membership help you evolve in commercial real estate?
Rose: It gave me exposure to a bigger world and a community of practitioners. When I thought I was alone developing green buildings, I met colleagues who were also doing it.
UL: Did you keep your family’s transit ethos?
Rose: Yes. All our new developments are near transit. For example, our current projects include redeveloping the train-station parking lots in Beacon, New York, which literally touches the station. Sendero Verde in East Harlem, which won ULI’s Terwilliger Center Award for Innovation in Affordable Housing, is within walking distance of subway stations. Our NC-6 project [also known as 11th and Berks] in Philadelphia will be our third project at the Temple University Train Station.
UL: Can you talk about the $660 million fund that closed this summer?
Rose: In 2001, I engaged Chris Lee, who I met at ULI, to do our first strategic plan. He said we had to grow our capital base by raising investment funds. In 2005, we launched what we think is the world’s first impact-focused real estate investment fund—investing only in acquisition and development projects within walking distance to mass transit or main street retail, and improving them following LEED or Enterprise Green Communities ratings.
It became clear our company comprised minor players in retail and office buildings, but we had a competitive advantage with our deep knowledge of affordable housing, so we started raising private-equity funds focused on buying and preserving existing affordable housing, making them green, and bringing social, health, and educational programs to our residents. Investors didn’t want development risk, so these funds focused on buying existing properties, keeping them affordable, greening them, reducing their climate impacts, and bringing social, health, and education programs on site. Our first affordable housing preservation fund was only $25 million, but our investor, Goldman Sachs, gave us institutional credibility. The latest, Fund VI, is $660 million. Levered, that’s $1.8–$2 billion of purchasing power. Today our investor base includes not only pension funds and large financial institutions, but also university and foundation endowments and family offices. We measure affordability by “unit-years preserved” and typically achieve 100,000 unit-years per fund.
UL: I understand you helped inspire a Terwilliger Center study.
Rose: While on the Terwilliger Center advisory board, I suggested research to establish affordable housing as a valid investment asset class. They did the study, and it has been incredibly helpful for everyone raising capital in the sector. (Webinar on the topic)
UL: What’s next?
Rose: Continue raising funds, preserving more affordable housing, and developing new affordable and mixed income housing. On the development side, we would like to use even greener building systems, such as mass timber. We are also beginning to explore working in the UK and EU markets—there’s a 24-million-unit affordable housing deficit in the EU, and public/private partnerships are likely to be part of the solution. That’s something we specialize in. I am also focusing on company succession—we have an amazing group of rising leaders in the firm.
We also want to advance the financing and development of multigenerational and intergenerational housing. Zoning, financing, and subsidy rules conspire against families living together, yet that’s how humans lived for almost all of history. We are developing one of the first affordable housing projects in New York City that accommodates grandparents raising grandchildren.More collective forms of real estate ownership also have great promise. I used part of my ULI Visionary prize to fund an Urban Institute study on collective ownership models—community land trusts, co-ops, mutual housing associations. These strengthen community, and increase social resilience and collective wealth, which are essential in volatile times.
UL: We’re in a strange moment with AI disruption and job loss. What do you make of that?
Rose: AI will be an extremely powerful force, with enormous investment pressures on its creators to deliver value. That value will come from software firms integrating AI into everything we do, whether we want it or not, and charging us for it.Most of the ULI members’ costs of production are labor, materials, rent, debt service, insurance, energy, and software. The cost of software, materials (with tariffs), energy, and insurance are increasing; we have no control over debt service costs, and so, the only place to reduce cost will be by reducing labor and rent. AI doesn’t need a seat in offices.Our governments, which are supposed to protect the common good, have a responsibility to regulate AI so that it truly is a vehicle of communal benefit. But most governments seem to be unwilling or unable to regulate AI, or, if they do, their regulations are of limited scope.
ULI, as a global organization committed to creating extraordinary communities and increasingly recognizing that we need to benefit humans and nature, should gather its thinkers and propose AI regulatory frameworks for nations, states, cities, and communities to harness the power of AI for the common good. ULI has the credibility and reach to be an important contributor to this rapidly emerging future. If we are to live up to our motto, Where the Future Is Built, our time to engage is now.
